mutation

Is it possible that one strong experience can change you for good and mutate your personality out of recognition? Can one strong stimulus or a couple of them administered steadily over a period alter you as a person?

For sure. And I suspect theories like ‘learn from past experience’ are offshoots of this concentrated theory.


My true calling might have come from elsewhere, but when in college I was passionate about Biotechnology. A subject that dealt with life and how it could be engineered.

Day after day we’d shuffle into our lab for a new set of experiments. On the first day of microbiology lab, our professor told us that the first step was the most important and that our test results would be based on the efficiency of its execution.

Sterilization was the first step. We flamed the apparatus, pressured the glassware and topped it all off with a generous flourish of methanol. We thought we were microbe-free. The thing about Biotech is you know you’ve messed up only when you get the final result. And the result of my first experiment was clouded by contamination. (Those dratted colonies of fungi I shall never forgive.) Anyway, there came a point when my sterilization skills finally became decent. But I still observed minor contamination. Annoyed, I demanded an explanation from my professor. He finally admitted it could be mutation. That the unwanted microbes might have got acclimatized to high temperatures, pressures and dehydrants. That one of their little DNA fragments might have mutated to make them resistant to my extreme subjections. So I watched dismayed as batch after batch of carefully cultured baby E Coli got killed by those damned mutated monsters.

Fast-forward some years. Early this morning, an annoyed friend of mine sent me a particularly caustic mail saying that she had had it with all my depressed/ depressing status messages and that I’d darned well start cleaning up my act. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an act I could clean up. It wasn’t even an act. I really had become that person. The person who was perennially whiny/ moody/ angry/ disillusioned/ directionless. Exactly the kind of person I would’ve turned my nose up on some months back.

It all started several months back when something I believed in was shattered. The next month, yet another huge blow presented itself. And yet another. And again. Four strong stimulus and consequent months of avoiding it resolutely, instead of dealing with it, changed me. Every day was a bad day, even the good ones. I forgot how to be happy, I was out of practice and seemed to have unlearned the art of happiness. I wanted nothing more than to sit at home away from all life.

People from all corners reached out to me, wanting to help. I was impermeable. I had become resistant to external stimuli. Positivity bounced off me like a ping pong ball.

And that’s not even the worse part. I became a weed. I depressed the living daylights out of those around me. The mutated me was selfish and terrible.

Thankfully these mutations are reversible. A strong dose of good mutangen was what I needed. And this morning, when my friend lambasted me it really hit me. That was my good mutagen. I started cleaning up right away.

Which got me thinking, if several lethal doses of bad mutagen could be reversed by one strong dose of good mutagen, then perhaps we can immunize ourselves against bad stimuli altogether by being exposed to the good ones. By surrounding ourselves with positive people, by smiling more often, by doing good to others, by putting in our best in whatever we do, by reaching out to others as often as we reach within ourselves in the quest for peace, by finding joy even in the thinnest of silver linings.

Ultimately, mutation too is a choice. You can choose to use it how you please. You take what you want to survive and become stronger. The bacteria took what it needed to battle the odds. So did I.

You need strength to resist the bad mutations though, they are always that bit more menacing. That’s where your friends and family come in. They form a wall around you, protecting you.

On hindsight, mutations are a good thing. A particle of dust underwent repeated mutations and several centuries later the first human baby was born (sorry, I don’t buy into the Adam theory). Mutation led to evolution. And I dare say mutation of the personality too leads to its evolution. You either grow or depreciate with each mutation. You evolve.

When you die you die evolved.

I know how I want to be when I die.